


a close reading of sonnet 116

by notbecauseofvictories



Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-03-02 22:53:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2828936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notbecauseofvictories/pseuds/notbecauseofvictories
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,<br/>but bears it out even to the edge of doom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a close reading of sonnet 116

Paris had kissed her again, on that beach—her mouth warm and her hand at Rory's waist. It was a languid kiss, alcohol-slow and _nice_ , unexpected, unexpecting.

"You're my best friend, you know," Paris had said when she pulled away. She had been very serious and Rory couldn't help laughing, because it seemed funny—Paris there, with the whole ocean reflected in her eyes and saying things like _you're my best friend._

Paris had looked hurt, until Rory fell back against the sand, still giggling, and said, "I know, Paris. I know. You're my friend too."

They didn't talk about it, and Rory never told anyone. She was still shaking sand from her hair, a week later.

.

("Remember when we hated each other?" they say sometimes, like those were other people, in another country. Characters from the yellowed diaries of distant relatives—Paris, brittle and belligerent, all armor and teeth; Rory, uncertain and reserved, so careful not to transgress. Strangers, wearing their faces.

Other times, Rory has to remind herself that she had a whole life before Chilton, a full cast of characters and rich plot, and absolutely no Paris-shaped hole in her story. She hadn't been some princess asleep in a glass coffin, waiting for a short blonde knight to ride up and shout at her until she woke up, and took the reins of her own life.

Because Rory just forgets, sometimes, a little.)

.

"Hey, so, what memory would you use to conjure a patronus?" Rory asked Paris once, taking a break from her pre- _Half-Blood Prince_ release re-read.

"That concert we went to, back at Chilton," Paris replied absently, not even glancing up from her latest unholy creation. "It was the first time I felt like anyone wanted me in the room."

Rory walked around with a warm, shivery kind of feeling for the rest of the day, not really sure how to shake it.

.

Once, Paris was working herself into a snit about—something, almost vibrating with it, her voice edging into an even shriller register, and all Rory could think to do was grab her by the shoulders, force her to be still, to breathe, to—

Paris went silent, staring at Rory with wide eyes. "Oh," Rory said, letting go a minute later. Paris had been—warm, and solid. She wasn't sure what she had been expecting, but it somehow wasn't that. "Sorry."

"Yeah," Paris said. "Um. Okay."

They didn't talk about that either.

.

There were nights on the road with the campaign when Rory was so homesick for Stars Hollow she felt it like a physical ache, and it was too late to call her mother, or grandma, or even Luke. So she called Paris, who spent most nights at the library or the lab, doing scut work for some doctor she was hoping to impress.

Paris answered the phone with a groaned "I hate sick people", and Rory laughed and laughed until it was okay, she was okay.

.

Rory had been working for the magazine for a little over a year when Paris emailed her a picture. It was Paris and another woman, sitting in a bar.  Paris looked happy in that furtive, hesitant way she had, and the other woman was smiling down at her, as though she hadn't noticed the camera at all.

The email header was simply, _My girlfriend._

Rory wrote back, _She looks nice. If you still need my help to get ready for dates, though, you're paying for airfare._

_I understand. Print **is** a dying medium,_ was Paris' response.

.

Rory didn't remember the point at which Paris became the person she missed most, after her mother. Like everything with Paris, it had come, and stayed, woven itself into her life without ever asking permission.

_Wish you were here,_ Rory wrote in an email, and sent with it a picture of her, shaking Hilary Clinton's hand.

_I hate you so much,_ Paris wrote, and half a country away, Rory had laughed _._

.

Rory was in town for less than twenty-four hours, a stopover between Chicago and DC, just to see her mother, eat dinner with Sookie and have some of Luke's coffee. To remind herself that Stars Hollow would always be there, when she wanted it.

Cambridge was in the wrong direction, but she drove up there anyway. Except Paris wasn't home, and after a minute of staring at her phone, Rory pulled the car into drive and left.

"You chickened out," Lane said, when Rory mentioned it the next day.

"What? No! I just—yeah, I totally chickened out." 

"Oh, Rory," Lane said. "You can't keep dating Jesses and Logans and hoping someone else will be your bravery for you."

(Rory listened, and very carefully didn't think about glass coffins, and knights with long, golden hair.)

.

It was just out of the corner of Rory's eye—a flash of blonde hair beneath the lights, and Rory's heart was in her throat. It certainly wasn't _impossible_ for her to be here, but Rory wasn't expecting, she hadn't thought—

"Excuse me, I have to...excuse me," Rory said to Richard-call-me-Dick, and slipped away through the crowd, following the sound of a woman's voice growing louder and more strident as the insults grew more eloquent.

"I don't know what's more stunning to me, the fact that you, an adult with presumably the right to participate in the electoral process—" 

"Hi," Rory interrupted. She was trying not to smile like an idiot, and suspected she was failing.

Paris faltered, staring at Rory with wide eyes.

"'Hi'?" Paris finally retorted, as the man she'd been insulting fled. "You disappear off the face of the earth for four years, and that's all I get? 'Hi'?"

"Paris, we talked on the phone for three hours just a few weeks ago. I was in Chicago, covering the reelection campaign, you know that." 

"I'm not entirely convinced the midwest is a real place," Paris said archly. But something in her expression softened, and she asked, "So, uh, how are you?"

"Good. You?"

"Good. I—broke up. With Louisa. Well, actually, she broke up with me, it was a whole thing, something about how I'm not emotionally available enough, and when I spoke with Terrence, he said that I needed to focus on enriching my existing social bonds, so when your grandparents sent the invitation, I thought..."

She trailed off.

"I'm sorry about Louisa," Rory said. "And...you don't need to explain why you're here, Paris, you're basically family."

Paris' smile went to her eyes that time. Rory had forgot how nice it was, to make Paris smile. "I hate these parties," Paris volunteered after a minute, almost shyly. "They remind me of every function my parents ever hosted, or left me home for. Rich people lying to one another in order to score points. It's disgusting."

"Hey, they're also here to celebrate my grandparents' anniversary, they can't be totally irredeemable."

Paris gave her a withering look. "How can you be such a good political reporter when you live in a world of sunshine and singing bluebirds?"

"Probably the same way someone who hates sick people becomes such a good doctor."

They were silent for a minute or two, watching people come and go through the rooms, laughing socially-appropriate laughs, and Rory kept sneaking little glances at Paris, like they were sixteen again, at the Bangles concert in borrowed seats.

"You know," Rory said, because Paris was here, she was here, looking uncertain and a little unhappy and—when Paris was unhappy, the world was Deadwood. Rory had hated Deadwood. "You know, there's this balcony on the second floor, it's a perfect hideout, totally private..."

Paris swallowed. "Rory, I—"

"C'mon," she said, holding out a hand. "I almost visited you once, you know. But I chickened out. Lane said I chickened out too, and she said—I need someone else to be brave for me, that's why I date guys who push the envelope. I want them to be brave for both of us. So this is...me being brave for me."

"Am I supposed to understand any of that?"

"Not really."

Paris smiled. "I need some air," she said, and took Rory's hand.

.

(Paris had kissed her two dates later, a messy, eager thing; hard, with Paris' hand at the nape of her neck, and it had been—it had been like arguing with her, all that fraught energy and confusion and brightness.

"Wow," Paris said, when they broke apart. "Okay."

Rory touched her forehead to Paris'. "Okay".)

.

"You know," Paris said one afternoon, as she was preparing dinner, "given our personal history, it would have been much more appropriate if we had performed _Much Ado About Nothing_ at Chilton, instead of Romeo and Juliet."

Rory looked up from her laptop, and made a face. "Yeah, how could Professor Anderson not prepare her lesson plan based on the future relationship of two of her students. The mind boggles."

"I'm just saying. We did start out as combative and witty nemeses."

"Oh my god." 

"Also, 'a woman loves the meat in her youth that she cannot endure in her age'? You know what meat I'm talking about."

"Oh my _god._ " 

"I'm just saying, that play is overdue for a queer reading." 

"Paris, you didn't even kiss me in Romeo and Juliet."

Paris actually blushed. "I wanted to, though," she said, quietly.  


Rory smiled, snagging Paris by the sleeve of her sweater as she passed—which produced an indignant _'This is alpaca!'_ from Paris. Rory laughed, pulling her closer.

"I will kiss thee, then," Rory said, and did.


End file.
